Link Building Interview with Venchito Tampon

By Sef
Posted On
Monday, February 09, 2015
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Link building is a though job. You need to have knowledge, expertise and skill to implement a successful link building campaign for a website. Obviously, not everyone have requirements and can implement a high quality link building campaign.

In this interview, we have Venchito Tampon on board to share his experience, knowledge and specialty in link building.

Let's do this!

1. Who is Venchito Tampon and how was your life like before? How did you get started in search industry and what was your starting point?

Venchito Tampon is the sole author of the link building and content marketing blog, Digital Philippines. He is also the Co-Founder and Marketing Director of LinkCore Media, a high quality content marketing and link building company. He also coaches potential internet marketers in the local scene by becoming a Filipino motivational speaker and by sharing his digital marketing knowledge on local workshops and seminars.

I became a freelance writer one year before I entered in the search marketing industry (2012). It’s tough game since I need to continuously apply for different writing jobs in order to increase my active income.

Maybe, that’s one of the reasons why I love our industry (search). It is because everyone has the guts to compete, learn new skills for technical, writing and marketing purposes and earn a well compensating income in a short period of time.

2. Your blog mainly focused in link building, what made you focus in this particular area?

I’ve seen a lot of new internet marketing and SEO blogs that are being launched almost every week so I thought there’s a top need to start a blog that is unique and almost different from the others – that made me focus on link building.

Those two topics mentioned above are closely related to my main blog theme, which is link building.

3. How do you a create link building strategy for a client?

Here is a simple process that I follow when creating link building strategies for my clients.

Learn everything about the website. It is important to deeply understand the company’s selling proposition or how it generates revenue, what makes it different from its competitors and how many contents are available in the website.

Learn from the client’s competitors. Link searching on competitors is a good technique to analyze how the industry works (i.e. how does each and every backlink is being acquired).

Analyze what method(s) are effective to use in that particular industry by understanding the relationships between the pages being linked to and the linking websites.

I guess this is a pretty simple process to implement but there’s so much value that you’ll get when you do a thorough research first before starting off the campaign straight.

4. How do you measure a successful link building campaign?

For agencies who are working on full SEO packages, the main measurement of the success of the campaign lies on the referral visits and assisted conversion part of the site’s analytics.

If there’s an increase in those site’s aspects, then the link strategy is effective. Though there’s still a need to test more link tactics in order to get better results next time.

5. What is your specialty in link building?

Our specialty as a link building team is the ability to pitch webmasters/bloggers that we haven’t been engaged before (stranger type) and to build long term relationships with them that’ll benefit both parties.

It’s really tough to discuss corporate/blogger partnerships through email since there’s no sense of loyalty unless you already have years of connections with a specific person.

Though with the right approach and value to offer to the person, you can easily catch his/her attention and engage with him/her for the longest time.

6. When accepting link building campaign from a prospect client - What questions do you ask to qualify a client for link building?

Here are a few questions that I ask to my potential clients for our link building services?

What are the best contents that you have on your website or are you still planning to create in the future?

Who are your competitors?

What groups of people are you targeting for your campaign?

Do you have any past relationships with bloggers/webmasters in your industry?

The more we understand the client’s business and its industry, the easier for us to create a strategy that will fit in to their business needs.

7. How do you charge your clients for link building and what are your deliverables?

We have a custom pricing for our link building services but basically we price at around $800 every month (starting rate).

The client can still continue working with us after a month if he/she is satisfied with the quality of our services (no strings attached).

8. How do you find link opportunities for your clients and how does this change from industry to industry?

There are so many tactics that I use to find link opportunities and I’ve written a big post on that specific topic, but to recap a few of my favorite methods, here’s a list that you can immediately apply:

Do a Google search prospecting for available links/resource pages in your industry (use inurl:resources OR inurl:links “topic”) but don’t end there, create a list of websites/pages that you see in every resource page and go find their linking domains/pages. They may not be your client’s direct competitors but they have linking pages, which are low hanging fruits that you can easily get.

Perform reverse engineering on a deeper level. Use Ahrefs or other third party link analysis tools to find linking domains of your client’s competitors but make sure to understand how they are able to acquire their links (analyze the link relationships).

Go to industry forums and look of active users that have their own blogs/sites that you can quickly engage with through email, since they are the ones who’re responsive to email conversations due to the nature of their work (freelancing).